The old man would not be consoled. “He is still out there. It goes on.” He accepted the glass from Eph, drank it, and sat back. “These vampires now…they are in their infancy. We are about to witness a new stage in their evolution. It takes about seven nights to become fully turned. For their new parasitic organ system to complete its formation. Once that occurs, once their bodies are no longer comprised of vital organs—heart, lungs—but only a series of chambers in the body, they will be less vulnerable to conventional weaponry. And they will continue to mature beyond that time—learning, becoming smarter, more used to their environment. They will band together and coordinate their attacks, and individually become much more nimble and deadly. Making it much harder to find and defeat them. Until eventually it will become impossible to stop them.” The old man finished his brandy and then looked at Eph. “I believe what we saw up there on that rooftop this morning was the end of our kind.”

Eph felt the weight of the future pressing down on them all. “How much is there that you haven’t told me?”

Setrakian’s eyes were rheumy as he stared off into the middle distance. “Too much to speak of now.”

A short while later, he was asleep. Eph looked at his gnarled fingers twisting the hem of the bedsheet on his chest. The old man’s dreams were feverish.

“Dad!”

Eph went out to the main room. Zack was sitting in the computer chair, and Eph gripped the boy from behind, wrapped him up in another hug, kissing the top of his head, breathing in the scent of his hair. “I love you, Z,” he whispered.

“Love you too, Dad,” Zack said back, and Eph ruffled his hair and let him go.

“Where are we with this?”

“Almost all set.” The boy returned to the computer. “I had to create a dummy e-mail address. You pick a password.”

Zack was helping Eph upload the video of Ansel Barbour in the dog shed—which Eph had not yet shown Zack—onto as many file-sharing and broadcast video web sites as possible. Eph wanted true vampire footage out there on the Internet for the world to see. It was the only way he could think of to reach people and make them comprehend. He wasn’t worried about fostering chaos and panic: the riots continued, confined to poorer neighborhoods, though their spread was just a matter of time. The alternative of continued coordinated silence in the face of an extinction event was too absurd to consider.

This plague would be fought at a grassroots level now—or not at all.

Zack said, “Now I select the file, like this, and move it up as an attachment…”

Fet’s voice came from the kitchen, where he was watching television, eating deli chicken salad out of a half-pound plastic tub. “Look at this.”